


Forevermore

by CalmSpirited



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Multi, another long story by Me, some lewdness but no pp's, theres mentions of other charas but im too lazy to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22888051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalmSpirited/pseuds/CalmSpirited
Summary: The first four to begin the Trials are the first four to escape.But some things can't be erased.
Relationships: Dwight Fairfield/Jake Park/Meg Thomas/Claudette Morel
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge, HUGE thanks to melodramatic-butterfly on tumblr for editing this and for the title and for all their love and support in this shitshow- cannot thank them enough!
> 
> 17k divided into 2 chapters hell ya :)

They didn’t know how they had all made it out-

_ “Ow, my fuckin’ head-” _

_ “Dwight, get your fat ass off me!” _

_ “I can’t breathe!-” _

-all of them together, at that-

_ “Getyourfootoffmydickplease-” _

-but there they were, all four of them clamoring on top of each other in a large Survivor pile in the middle of the woods at an ungodly hour at night.

“Dwight!” Meg finally yelled, having enough of Dwight blindly grabbing at her tits and gave the man a swift punch in his collarbone. The bespectacled man gasped loudly and retched, clutching where Meg had just hit him and rolled off, having been on top of everybody else and about to have been responsible for multiple counts of manslaughter.

“Thank you!” she answered very sarcastically, finally managed to wiggle herself out from under Claudette, who had been struggling breathlessly due to Dwight’s body crushing her ribcage. Getting to her feet first, Meg took a deep breath and put her hands on her hips to stare at the scene: Dwight, blindly wiping off his glasses onto his very dirty office shirt; Claudette, sitting up on her knees coughing after having her ribcage nearly crushed-

And then there was Jake who Meg had  _ accidently  _ kicked  _ several  _ times where the sun didn't shine in her attempt to get Dwight off of her, laying on his front and moaning softly in pain, knees slightly curled inward.

Meg rolled her eyes, feeling only  _ slightly  _ bad for being the cause of his pain. “Iron Will, much?”

“Fuck you.” Came the agonized response from the saboteur. “It doesn’t work against  _ repetitive dick kicks.” _

“It’s not my fault that you ended up being the bottom bitch-”

“Megan, please!” Dwight, finally given up on wiping his glasses free of dirt and debris, got to his feet and attempted to put on his brave face. “We have more important things to deal with, like  _ where in the heck are we!” _

“What happened?” Claudette inquired, shakily getting up to her knees. “I-I mean, we  _ know  _ what happened, but where did we end up? I’ve never seen that place before.”

“I don’t know, either.” Dwight answered, adjusting his glasses on his face so he could see his friends properly. “That last trial was weird, too.”

“So, the Trapper went super tryhard on us, big deal.” Meg shrugged. “In case you forget, Dwight, there were  _ glowing zombies  _ chasing us afterwards. Y’all are lucky that  _ I  _ managed to keep them busy long enough-”

“-For me to break the lock on the gate.” Jake finished for her after managing to roll over to his back with a grimace of pain lancing his features. “You don’t know how much pain I’m feeling right now.” 

“Oh, you’re alright.” But nonetheless, Meg quickly jogged over to where Jake was laying and leaned down, holding her arm out for Jake to take. The survivalist eagerly took her hand, and stiffly got up to his knees before standing upright with a tight-lipped grunt. Meg poked him in the arm. “Big baby.”

“Speaking of babies…” Claudette softly spoke, closely examining her shirt. “...we’re fresh like one. Is- is that the saying?”

Meg turned on her heels to stare at Claudette, running all possible combinations of phrases that included the word  _ baby  _ and honestly, her mind was coming up blank. “...yeah, close enough.” But upon looking down at herself, Meg discovered that what Claudette was trying to say was true; she was wearing the exact same running outfit that she was taken in, bar of any dirt, grime or blood. In fact, upon looking around, Meg saw that everybody else was relatively dirt and blood free just like her.

“Where’s the campfire?” Jake asked, moving his head back and forth to scout out any sign of the ever-burning flames out in the distance. Or  _ anywhere  _ for that matter. “I don’t see it.” He craned his head around distant trees to see if he could see anything else… but there was  _ nothing _ recognizable _.  _

“Okay, everyone, calm down!” Dwight put his hands up, trying to reassure everyone that nothing was wrong. “This is probably just another trick of the Entity’s. Let’s just stick together and not wander off-  _ Jake _ , come back here!” Jake had, in fact, started to wander off just to the edge of his peripheral vision the moment he had begun to speak.

To Dwight’s relief, Jake immediately came to a halt, but pointed in the direction that he had been walking. “It looks like there’s a light over there.”

“A light?” Meg questioned, ignoring Dwight’s directions and jogging next to Jake to look where the survivalist was pointing. “Oh shit, he’s right! Dwight, there’s a light over there!” She hopped once on her feet, energy racing up her spine like lightening and threatening to consume her if she didn’t  _ take off- _

“WAIT!” Dwight yelled, raising his voice to stop Meg from running off. “If we separate now, we’ll lose each other for good!”

“He’s right, Meg.” Claudette squeezed herself in between Meg and Jake. “I say we go towards the light-” The Canadian grabbed Meg’s and Jake’s arms before looping them in her own. “-together.”

Meg smiled and had the audacity to blush.“Claudette, that’s really gay-”

“But necessary.” Dwight finished, and stood in place beside Jake, expectantly holding out his arm for Jake to interlock with. 

Gray eyes met brown for a moment, and Dwight honestly thought Jake was about to roll his eyes at him and start walking, but…  _ well _ , he did roll his eyes but also hooked his arm with Dwight’s. “At least we’ll  _ all  _ die being gay.”

“Can we  _ not _ die, please?” Claudette, the smallest of the four, secretly took advantage of being between Meg and Jake by discreetly pressing her arms into their sides for warmth and comfort. 

“Listen, what can be worse than glowing zombies?” Meg asked, much to Dwight’s chagrin.

“Don’t say that!” He whispered to her harshly. “We thought it couldn’t get worse than being Mori’ed, didn’t we?”

“Listen,  _ can we just go?!”  _ Jake hissed out, jerking his head towards the faint light in the distance while getting more and more agitated with every passing second that they were just standing there like dumbasses waiting to be killed. He didn’t want them all to be too involved in each other that the light disappears and they all miss it.

“Oh-  _ fuck _ , yeah. Okay, Dwight.” Meg encouraged, leaning forward so she could look around everyone to give Dwight a look. “Go ahead.”

“Me?” Dwight squawked, forgetting for half a second that he was the Campfire-appointed Leader and was supposed to  _ lead.  _ “Yes, yes, okay.”

He didn’t move. Not yet. 

He was just… waiting, yes, he was waiting-

“What’re you waiting for, Dwight?” Jake asked, irritation subtly lacing in his normally calm voice, and  _ well, he can understand why the normally chill man is upset, especially given that one of the glowing zombies had taken to… aggressively humping him- _

“He’s waiting for you to pull the stick outta your ass, Jake!” Dwight watched as Jake, who had been staring at Dwight turned his head so fast to glower at Meg that his neck popped, and Dwight decided that he was ready to lead now.

The still slightly nervous man took a step forward  _ (one at a time, he told himself) _ , trying to quell the racing thoughts in his head as he consciously put one foot in front of the other.  _ What if there were more zombies up ahead?  _ His friends were all silent besides him, except for the sound of their breathing.  _ What if there’s a killer? What if this is just a ruse? Or to get us into another Trial?  _ Jake had moved his arm low enough that he was physically gripping Dwight’s hand, and Dwight could feel, even though Jake’s thick gloves, that his palms were wet from perspiration. 

_ What if I’m leading them into a trap?  _

Dwight almost stops at that line of thought, a cold feeling of dread seeping into his chest at the idea of inadvertently leading his friends into some sort of trap, and God forbid if something happened to them because of that-

“That’s not a Campfire.” Claudette whispers, sounding incredulous. Everybody else quickly came to agreement with her observation.

Dwight gulped, scared to breathe, scared to  _ hope _ . “No, it isn’t.” 

“Hey.” Jake said softly, and Dwight saw out of the corner of his eye Jake’s head turned to the far left, staring at something in the distance.

Dwight’s breath caught in his throat when he saw what Jake was staring at: more lights appearing the closer they approached the first one, almost being in a straight line. In a rush of panic and excitement, Dwight whipped his head to the right and saw more lights poking out of the treeline in almost a straight line as well.

“Streetlights.” Meg whispered, and the broke the line and dashed forward against Dwight’s orders. “Streetlights!” She yelled as she jumped over a fallen log, her excitement echoing off the trees and reverbating into the night.

Jake sighed heavily, shaking his head and clicking his tongue once. “She’s just like a dog.” The woodsman commented. “You tell her to sit or stay but then she sees a squirrel and off she goes.”

“Should we run after her?” Claduette quietly asked, looking up between Dwight and Jake for advice on how to proceed.

“We could  _ try.”  _ Despite how warm he had become at Jake’s side, Dwight detangled himself from Jake and watched Claudette do the same. “Can’t catch her, though.”

“If she runs into a Killer, she’ll need help.” And before Dwight could utter a word, Claudette took off at a brisk jog in Meg’s direction. Jake looked as if he was going to perhaps reach out and stop her for a second, but then his shoulders sagged and he ran after Claudette.

A smile briefly formed on Dwight’s face when he thought he heard Jake mutter  _ “Here we go again.”  _ under her breath. Despite all that they had been through, some things never changed, like Meg’s boundless energy, Claudette’s endless empathy, Jake’s sweet and sour sarcasm  _ (speaking of which, Dwight could really go for some sweet and sour sauce) _ , and Dwight… well, he was still Dwight.

_ Still a baby _ , Meg still jests and prods, _ baby Dwight _ , even though he’s  _ (was?)  _ 25 years old!

It’s actually not long before they all catch up to Meg, which surprised all of them until they realized that she had come to a full stop at the edge of a road-  _ no, a big road. _ The streetlights were no more than 200 feet apart on both the same and either side, providing ample amount of light for the group of four. The street was two lanes, but was wide and well-maintained enough that Dwight would consider it a highway.

“This is one hell of a Realm.” Dwight found himself commenting out loud. “This is really big.”

“Uh…” Jake started, but trailed off to look around. “I don’t see any, like… structures. I haven’t seen a single hook or pallet. Have any of you?”

“No.” Claudette said, leaning down to inspect the ground when the highway met dirt and grass. “Either the Entity is getting very realistic or-”

Meg twisted around, braids hitting her cheeks and fly-away strands sticking to her open mouth. “Wait- wait, I haven’t seen a gen or window-  _ or a border wall! _ ”

Dwight’s heart both  _ plummeted  _ and  _ soared  _ at the same time, making him feel dizzy and faint. “Are we out?” His voice shook, afraid to ask the question leaving his lips. “Did we make it? Are we out?”

“That was easier than I expected.” Meg made a face at Jake’s statement.

“Easy, maybe,  _ for you!  _ Did you happen to  _ forget  _ that  _ I  _ ran a horde of glowing zombies around while you fiddled with a lock like it was your-”

“Guys.” Claudette interrupted, standing up from where she had been kneeling, holding a dandelion in her hands before blowing at it.

Dandelions were a rare find in the Entity’s Realm, and whenever someone blew the little white buds off of it, it would all instantly fade away into black smoke and the whole thing would disappear into thin air. 

It did neither of those.

“I almost  _ don’t  _ believe it.” It was Jake’s turn now to sound incredulous, his normal, calm face slack with surprise. “It was too easy- and  _ yes,  _ Meg, I appreciate you running those zombies around, but it just seems like the Entity let us go too easy.”

Despite the hope blossoming in Dwight’s chest, and him clinging to the idea that they had finally escaped  _ for good _ , Jake made sense. “Jake’s right. I doubt the Entity would just  _ let us go _ like that. I mean, we still have plenty of tasty emotions for it to feed off of, don’t we?”

Claudette shrugged. “Maybe it didn’t mean to. It is the Blight season. You know that the Entity makes mistakes during that time.”

Meg chuckled. “A lot of mistakes. Remember that time there was a hole in the middle of one of the Autohaven maps? Or when Myers had Billy’s chainsaw?”

_ That was the single most scariest thing Dwight had ever seen in his life.  _ “Don’t remind me, Meg. Please.”

The topic suddenly did a 180 when a low rumbling noise stopped any and all conversations. “What was that?” Dwight asked, looking around, half-expecting to see some sort of beast or monster heading towards him, his heart rate accelerating rapidly-

“I’m hungry.” Claudette said softly, a hand over her upper stomach. Dwight’s muscles unclenched when it dawned upon him that the grumbling noise that he heard was just Claudette’s stomach.  _ Wow, I need to stop being so paranoid- _

“Wait, you’re hungry?” Jake asked, eyes going wide as the puzzle pieces started to connect in his mind. When Claudette nodded in the affirmative, Jake suddenly lost all coolness in his face and turned to face Dwight and Meg in a flash.

“We were never hungry in the Entity’s Realm.”

Meg  _ jumped  _ Jake in an instant, wrapping her legs around his waist and hugging him so tightly that Jake stumbled backwards and fell on his ass with a loud grunt.

“OH MY GOD!” Meg exclaimed, not caring at all that they were in the woods in the middle of the night and with serial killers potentially lurking about. “YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?  _ YOU KNOW WHAT THIS FUCKING MEANS, JAKE?!”  _ Meg grabbed the scarf around Jake’s neck with both hands and shook him violently before turning her head nearly completely around and yelling at Dwight and Claudette.  **_“DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, FUCKERS-”_ **

Jake’s hands came up to grab Meg’s clutching his scarf, peeling them away and giving them a hard squeeze. “It means BE QUIET!” Voice just barely below a yell, Jake darted his eyes to the left. “There’s something coming.”

Following Jake’s eyes, Meg looked to the left and saw two lights coming from the distance in their direction at a rate of speed too fast to be any normal human- or faster than any Killer they knew-

“A car!” Scrambling off Jake, Meg gave no thought before stepping out onto the road, jumping up and down and waving her arms like a lunatic. “HEY STOP!” She yelled, despite her other friends hissing and urging her to get out of the road. “No!” Meg yelled back, arms still in the air. “If we’re out, we need to go home!”

“How do you know if we’re home or not?” Dwight questioned, taking a bold step and grabbing Meg’s tank top. The lights were coming more into view, going around a bend and bathing the two on the road in fluorescent light. “We could be in one of those zombie apocalypses like Bill was in!”

_ That  _ got Meg to stop for a second, looking at Dwight with her mouth open and eyebrows furrowing- but it was too late to abandon the flagging down attempt because the lights were coming to a slow stop, the sound of a car working against pavement and gravel crunching assaulting their ears, bright lights burning their eyes.

“Hey!” A man’s voice yelled, and a head poked out the driver side window. “You guys need something?”

“Uhh… yeah!” Dwight got his wits about him first, tugging down his office shirt to give an appearance of a well to do man. “We, uh, went on a hiking trip and our, um, car got stuck in the mud.” Dwight was never much of a liar; horrible at it and usually got called on his lies, but he’s not about to tell a total stranger about what he and his friends have been going through for  _ years. _

Dwight reaches the driver side window of a small-looking SUV first, and he meets the face of a man, maybe late 30’s, early 40s  _ (or maybe even his 50s because he vaguely reminded him of Ace) _ , the very first touches of wrinkles around his mouth and a few gray hairs at his temples, dark eyes and a look of genuine concern on his face- something Dwight wasn’t about to take for granted.

The driver ran his hand through his light brown hair, cut short in a semi-professional style and looked at Jake and Claudette still standing at the edge of the road. “All of you couldn’t get it out?”

“No, sir.” Meg spoke up, nudging Dwight to the side and taking his place at the driver’s side window. “It’s kinda an older car- we tried to push it out and we think one of our tires blew out and we’re out of gas. If you could just take our friends and I to the nearest gas station, we can call one of our other friends to come pick us up.” Meg gave the older man a wide smile, one that she shrunk slightly when she noticed an older woman in the passenger seat next to him, presumably his wife.

The man turned to the woman in the passenger seat. “Janie, you think we can fit all four of them back here?”

The woman shrugged. “As long as we don’t get stopped by the cops.”

A moment of silence except for the humming of the mini SUV, before the man tossed his hands up in the air and turned back to the two by his window. “If you all can squish yourself in the backseats, I’ll drive you up to Young’s Station- it’s about 10 miles up the road here.”

“Oh, thank you so much! You have no idea how much this means to us! Guys, we got a ride!” Meg called out to Jake and Claudette, wasting no time in throwing open the back door and clamoring inside. Dwight entered next, knowing better than to wait and taking the middle seat by Meg, fastening his seatbelt as if to say  _ you snooze, you lose, sucker!  _

Jake and Claudette came to the back door at the same time, Jake being the gentleman and letting Claudette get in first until the Canadian woman stopped halfway inside and turned back to speak to Jake “There’s not enough seats for you if I get in.”

Jake ran a hand through his hair, peeking around Claudette to get a look at the seating arrangement inside when Meg piped up. “Claudette, you’re tiny, just sit in Jake’s lap!”

Claudette balked. “Wh-” She started, but looked around and saw that there was really no room for all four of them to have a seat, and that Meg’s option was actually the most viable for them. Glancing back at Jake, Claudette climbed back down and motioned for Jake to get in first. 

It was dark, but Claudette  _ swore  _ she saw a light blush dusting Jake’s cheeks. Their eyes met for just a moment, but then Jake rolled his eyes and sighed in resignation as he climbed in. Cursing her small size, Claudette took great care not to sit on any… important bits, and made herself as comfortable as possible inbetween Jake’s spread legs while Dwight got a boney knee in his thigh.

The next 10 miles were very, very long and awkward for everyone, and luckily the couple in the front didn’t ask many questions until they got to the Young’s Station.

“My name’s Vernon, by the way.” The man introduced right after announcing that the Station was less than a mile away. “You all sure you got a friend who can help you out?”

“Uhh, yes, sir.” Dwight answered, pulling his fingers out of his mouth- a nervous habit he had yet to kick. 

“You  _ sure _ ?” Janie asked, turning around to inspect each of the four in the back. “At least let us give you some money for food or gas-”

“No, ma’am.” Dwight nervously laughed. “That’s- that’s not necessary, you-”

“Actually, it might take a while for our friend to get here.” Jake interjected, surprising all of the others into silence. “You don’t have to give us much, just a few dollars will do.”

“Oh, honey, I wish there was a place that sold enough food to feed all four of you for just a few dollars.” Janie leaned down to grab her purse sitting by her feet, digging through the cream-colored hobo bag and fishing out her wallet. After a few moments of looking, she pulled out a $20 and held it out for one of them to take, who ended up being Meg. “I hope this will be enough.” Janie said, slipping her wallet back into her purse.

“This’ll be plenty, thank you!” The idea of food had Meg salivating, hunger pains starting in the pit of her ribs.

“There’s a Subway connected to the station- you know like a convenience store and a fast food place combined? It’s a nice Subway.” Vernon said, before the sound of a turning light beeped and the car slowed down considerably and pulled into a decent-looking parking lot of a decent-looking brick building that, while connected, was clearly divided into two. “We’re here.” The driver announced, and unlocked the back doors with the upfront button. 

“Anything else you need?” Janie asked one last time, and Meg had already opened her mouth to say  _ no, thank you  _ until Dwight spoke first.

“Actually, umm, if it’s not too much trouble, can you give us some change so we can use a payphone?”

Meg’s eyes went wide and punched Dwight in the arm. “ _ Dwight- _ ” She hissed, not believing that he just asked for money for a payphone!

Apparently, the older couple up front thought Dwight’s request was funny as they got a few chuckles out of it. “The clerk inside should let you use their phone if you ask nicely.” Janie said. “God, I haven’t seen a payphone ever since cell phones became more common than pigeons.”

“Oh, well…” It was at that moment that Dwight realized that he had a problem; a problem about  _ 15 years old. _ “Thanks, we’ll, uh, we’ll ask!” Dwight tried to laugh as a way to break the embarrassment he felt, but it ended up just making him look like a lunatic.

Claudette, sensing Dwight’s awkwardness, quickly took off her seatbelt, quietly thanked the couple up front for all their help, and hopped out of the car with the rest of the group following behind her after many rounds of _ thank you’s _ and  _ have a nice evenings!  _ directed at the older couple.

“Dwight!” Meg hit Dwight on the arm again as soon as the SUV had pulled off. “I can’t  _ believe  _ you asked to use a payphone! What the fuck is wrong with you!”

“I’m sorry, okay!” Dwight exasperated. “In case you forgot, I was taken back in 2005!”

“God, what year is it?” Jake asked, looking around like he would find the answer written in cursive on the building somewhere.

“Speaking of, I can’t believe you took that money, Jake.” Claudette patted down her pockets until she pulled out her iphone and attempted to turn it on, but found that the battery was empty. “You rarely accept help.”

“I have, like, $10 in my wallet.” Jake said, reaching into his multiple pockets until he drew out said wallet with the $10 in it that he pulled halfway out to show everyone. “I honestly don’t know what we’re gonna do, but we’re gonna need money for it.”

Claudette shoved a hand into her front pocket, the sound of jingling change reachinging everyone’s ears. “I have a couple of dollars and change from my bus fare.” 

“I don’t think I have any mon- wait, I do, actually.” Meg leaned down, picked up her foot with her hand and slipped her shoe off. Digging her hand into her now empty shoe, Meg peeled back the sole of her shoe, much to Dwight’s disgust, and pulled out another $20. “Emergency money.” She proudly proclaimed. “Just in case someone ever robbed me, I would have this.”

“Uhh…” Dwight frantically shoved his hands into both of his front and back pockets, and came up with a few dimes and quarters, a $5 and a lot of lint balls. “I got this.”

“So, what, that’s…” Jake trailed off, counting quietly and quickly under his breath all the money they had gathered up together. “...$60 max?”

“Hotel’s outta the question, but at least we can eat at Subway.” Slipping her shoe back on, Meg hopped up the single step to the door of the Subway, and entered with a light spring in her step before anyone could stop her. 

Warm air brushed against her face, and the smell of cooking bread made her positively  _ rabid.  _ “Hi, welcome to Subway.” A tired feminine voice met her ears, and Meg had never been as grateful to see a tried, underpaid millennial face as she was right now.

“Hi, ummm…”  _ God, there was so much food she didn’t know what to get! _

“Just get something cheap, Meg.” Jake recommended, moving behind her to look at the food behind the glass display. 

“Don’t get so close, you feral bastard, you’re gonna get drool on my shoulder-”

“I just want a Roast Beef Sub.” Claudette said, cutting off whatever bickering that could’ve occured between Meg and Jake. The stern, motherly look she gave the rest of her friends told them to order food rather than fight or face her wrath.

Everybody knew better than to get into a fight in front of Claudette Morel.

A lot of time ordering complicated subs later, Jake was the only one who dared to speak before beginning to eat. “$26 for four subs and drinks?” Jake commented, right before he took an oversized bite. “Inflation is a bitch.”

“Speak for yourself. I remember when you could get a whole Subway meal for $5.” Dwight vaguely remembers giving up Pepsi for his health before he was taken by the Entity, but by  _ God _ , he’s going to have one now and he’s going to enjoy it. 

I know we’re trying to enjoy our meal, but-” Claudette sipped her bottled water that was questionably overpriced. “-we need to figure out what to do.”

“Yeah, like I said, hotel’s outta the question.” Meg burped, but excused herself like a lady with  _ manners _ . “So we gotta call someone.”

Nobody answered her with  _ “oh, I can call someone!” _ , like a sensible human being.

Meg looked at Dwight, and he gave her the most depressed look she’s ever seen on him. “I don’t really speak to my parents.”

“You have a brother, don’t you?” Jake asked. Dwight nodded, but still looked clinically depressed. “I don’t know his phone number, or if he’s still back in Iowa- I mean, probably, but I don’t even know where  _ we are. _ ” Dwight had been staring forlornly at his sub until he looked up at Claudette. “Can you call your parents in Canada?”

“I don’t think a gas station can call international, Dwight.” Meg answered for Claudette. “Plus, getting here from Canada would take too long, probably.”

“Do you think your mother is still…” Claudette started, but trailed off when she saw the sudden look of  _ pain  _ that formed in Meg’s eyes at the mention of her mother.

Meg had completely forgotten about her mother being ill- hadn’t thought about it in a long time, honestly, being too busy on surviving in the Fog to dwell on it. “I know her phone number, but… I don’t know, honestly.” Suddenly, her sub looked really fucking depressing, too. “I can try, but even if she’s still…” She couldn’t say it. “...I don’t know if she’ll be well enough to come get us.”

The table lapsed into silence for a moment, until Jake cleared his throat. “I can see if I can still call my family.” He took a big bite out of his sub and almost choked on it.

“Oh, yeah, aren’t your parents, like, rich, Jake?” Dwight asked, and Jake shrugged. 

“My father technically disowned me when I went to go live in the woods, but I know if my mother or brother found out I was alive, they would literally send the FBI down here to escort me back.”

“So  _ call them!”  _ Meg said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and couldn’t understand why Jake was being even the least bit reluctant.

“Meg, all of us have been missing or considered dead for years!” Keeping his voice low, Jake looked around to make sure there wasn’t anybody eavesdropping on their conversation before carrying on. “They probably won’t believe me if I told them I was alive or think that I went missing on purpose-”

“IT. DOESN’T. MATTER.” Meg beat the table with each word, but lowered her voice when the other three shushed her. “We have, like, $30 and we’re gonna need a shitton of therapy to get over all of the PTSD we’re gonna have! I don’t  _ care  _ if you don’t wanna be associated with an uber rich family or some bullshit like that, we need help! Any help! If you don’t call them, I’m gonna call them!”

“Okay, okay! Fine! I’ll call after I eat.” 

/////

Dwight, Claudette and Meg all crowded around Jake as he dialed his mother’s phone number (despite his best attempts to shoo them all away) and strained their ears to listen to what was going on.

“Dude, it’s like 1 a.m., are you sure she’s gonna pick up?” Meg asked in a whisper.

“It’s her personal cell, and very few people have that number.” The phone rang and rang while everyone waited with baited breath. As the seconds ticked on, Jake was almost certain that he wasn’t about to get an answer and started to put the phone down-

_ “Hello? Who is this?” _

The sound of his mother’s voice, he could never admit out loud, almost made him burst into tears. “Mom?” His voice had a slight tremor to it, and he heard his mother gasp on the other end of the line.

_ “Who is this?”  _ She demanded again, and Jake could feel the anger building in her voice.  _ “Is this some-” _

“엄마, 제이크입니다. 당신의 작은 새 소년입니다. 날 데리러 와줘.” The sudden switch of languages was jarring to those listening in, but evidently whatever Jake said prompted the woman on the other end of the phone to burst into tears and Jake could even be seen wiping at his eyes incessantly. The next bits of conversation were in Korean, but Jake soon switched back to English.

"Mom, I have some...friends with me-"

_ "Friends?" _ Jake's mom repeated like it was a shock, and Meg snickered.

"Yeah, it's a long story-"

_ "Tell me where you are, sweetheart, and I'll come straight away." _

"We're, umm…" Jake turned back to his friends. "Do you know what city we're in?"

"I'm just hoping we're in America." Dwight was the only one who answered.

Jake sighed, but told his mother to wait a moment while he put the phone down on the counter and walked back into Subway for a few moments before returning to pick up the phone.

"We're in Mariba, Kentucky, at a place called Young's Station with a Subway attached to it.”

"Kentucky?" Claudette's face screwed up in confusion, mirrored by Jake's mother's voice on the other end of the phone.

_ "Kentucky? How in the world did you end up in-" _

"It's a long story, mom." Jake reiterated, a tired look drawing lines under his eyes. "I promise I'll explain later, but can you just...get here?"

_ "Of course, sweetheart. I'll be there as soon as I can." _

"Mom, please don't speed." The dial tone rang.

"So, how long before she gets here you think?"

"If she drives, then probably about 5 hours."

/////

It was actually only about four and a half hours, amazing considering the journey took about 8 hours according to Google Maps.

The convenience store cashier, who had overheard how long they were going to have to wait for their ride, let the four of them chill out in the employee break room for the time being. Meg and Claudette both fell asleep against Jake, who had originally opted to stay awake to wait for his mother to arrive but fell asleep as well when the warmth of the girls against him pulled him into slumber. Dwight, still feeling like a live wire, had bit his nails down to the quick till they bled before he realized it and had to go wash his hands and ask for a band aid.

It was when he had just thrown the band aid paper away out in the actual store when Dwight saw how... _ different _ things looked. A customer had come in and bought lottery tickets out of a very bright-looking vending machine. Another customer bought something that read an "electronic cigarette" on the package. There were little phone chargers everywhere for sale and little, flat monitors everywhere that reminded him of Lery's too much for him to closely inspect.

Dwight thought about buying a pack of normal cigarettes to calm his nerves  _ (a habit he picked up at 14 and quit once he started having bad coughs at the end of high school) _ , but when he saw how expensive a single pack was he thought twice. Plus if he'd started again Dwight knew it'd be extremely hard to put back down.  _ Quitting once was hard enough. _

Opting to return back to the break room for the time being, Dwight found one of the only things to do to keep his mind off other things was to eat some of the snacks and stare at his three sleeping friends. Meg was drooling on Jake’s shoulder, Claudette was leaning most of her upper body against Jake’s other arm, and Jake looked like a bug in a rug- even had a pleasant look to his face while he slept. Both him and Meg were snoring as well, Meg making one of those deep snoring sounds and Jake’s a more high pitched, whistling sound.

_ God, they were all adorable. _ Dwight remembers that, for a long time, it was just the four of them against the Trapper, and then the Wraith, and then the Hillbilly, and then over time, more and more survivors and killers started trickling in, but the four of them had always been the closest. No matter who the new survivor was, or what new toys the Entity gave the Killers-

“Excuse me.” Dwight heard a woman’s voice with a slight but noticeable accent loud and clear, even in the breakroom where the loudest sounds he heard was the whirring of the drinks machine. She sounded as if she was on the verge of yelling, and Dwight picked up a sense of urgency in the woman’s tone. “My son- he called from here about four hours ago-”

_ Jake’s mother _ \- Dwight instantly got up from his seat and started shaking the sleeping trio- Jake in particular. “He’s with a group of friends?” Dwight heard the cashier ask, and he took drastic measures when only Claudette blinked a few times and slapped Jake across his face. He awoke instantly with a grimace and a snarl across his face, one that instantly disappeared when the voice of Jake’s mother could be heard again asking where they were.

Claudette sat upright just in the nick of time because Jake  _ threw  _ Meg off of him and made a mad dash for the door, throwing it open and startling everyone in the store.

Dwight quickly clambered behind him, just in time to see Jake’s mother put a hand over her mouth, tears forming instantly in her eyes and slowly started to walk over to Jake. 

“Mom.” Jake breathed out, not quite knowing what to do with himself until his mother sobbed openly and held her arms out to him, and Jake met her halfway to hug her smaller frame to his.

And for the second time in Dwight’s recollection, Jake cried openly in front of others.

/////

It had taken Jake a long time to open up to his closest friends about his background, especially when Meg brought out a whiteboard that she had found in Lery’s and started what she called a “Clue Chart” that involved a dry erase marker and lots of string and tape. It was Meg who figured out that Jake was fed bank rolls instead of dinner rolls  _ (something that made everyone laugh) _ growing up, and eventually Jake came clean about his wealthy upbringing, but never gave any of them  _ exact  _ details about why he was so rich.

Whatever the reason why he was so rich was, it must’ve been a pretty fucking big one due to the  _ palace  _ that they pulled up to many hours and several naps later on the road from Kentucky to Virginia.

“JAKE WHAT THE FUCK!” Meg yelled out the instant Jake confirmed that this is where his family lived. “WHAT THE  _ FUCK  _ IS THIS- _ OH MY GOD _ IS THAT A NAKED LADY STATUE IN A BIG ASS FOUNTAIN?! IS THAT  _ TIDDIES _ !?!”

“Meg, stop screaming!” Claudette nudged her friend gently in the arm, wiping the sleep from her brown eyes. “Some people are prone to headaches.”

“Oh, sorry! Sorry, I forgot!” Meg lowered her volume immediately, but was still literally bouncing in her seat and demanding a tired Jake tell her how  _ stacked  _ he was.

“Let’s just say-” He started, rubbing his eyes to keep himself awake. “-my family could probably buy each of us a place like this. Twice over.” The miniaturized limo that they were in came to a slow halt at a giant gate that Meg also gawked at, proclaiming that they probably needed it to stop everybody from stealing the naked lady statues that they had.

“I can’t believe you didn’t take the naked lady statues when you became a hobo, Jake.”

“Oh my God.” Jake said in the most sarcastically monotone voice he could muster. “I can’t believe I forgot to take the naked lady statues when I packed up. I had the perfect suitcase for it and everything. I’m such a fucking idiot, please forgive me, Meg.”

Dwight had opened his mouth to tell the two to stop bickering because the car had stopped moving when the back door was opened by the nicely dressed chaufer that had driven them all the way back and Jake’s mother stepped into view.

“Now Jake-” She started, before looking at everyone in the backseat and seemed to have a change of mind about something. “-I need to talk to you for a moment about something.”

Dwight had never seen Jake look so…  _ perturbed  _ before, all of a sudden. But he nodded, and climbed out first to stand by his mother who turned to the rest of them and said with a smile

“The rest of you go ahead in. I promise Jake and I will be in soon.”

/////

_ “Meg.” _

_ She spun around to face the sallow and sunken face of her mother, standing behind her. _

_ “Where did you go, Meg?” _

_ No, no, she’s not here, she can’t be- _

_ “I was so worried-” _

_ But she didn’t look worried. She looked the opposite. Angry. Sad. Diabolical. _

_ “When you didn’t come back-” _

_ Meg walked forward, but her mother always stayed the same distance from her no matter how fast she ran. _

_ “I thought you’d abandoned me, just like your father did.” _

_ No!, she tried to cry out, but her mouth opened and nothing but a cold wind came forth. _

_ “And then-” Suddenly her mother was gone from in front of her and was behind her, cold and stiff hands clasping her shoulders so hard that she couldn’t move. _

**_“-I DIED.”_ ** _ Sharp nails dug into her shoulders, her voice came back in a agonized scream as the nails pierced bone, and suddenly she was behind thrown up on the hook. _

_ Her mother stood before her again, but was shrinking, decaying right in front of her eyes and transforming into the Hag, the small husk of a former human who had been eaten alive and stared at her with hollow eyes- _

“Meg!” Two hands were on her chest, shaking her violently and Meg found herself clinging to her sheets hard enough that her knuckles ached.

The dark form above her-  _ it was the Hag!-  _ Meg scrambled away, grabbing the sheets and pillows all around her and throwing it at the creature on top of her, falling to the floor once she had moved too far away but was on her feet in no time, dashing to the open window-

“Meg, stop!” It was Claudette’s voice-  _ was she in danger?-  _ the concern for her friend was too much to ignore, and Meg stopped just as she was about to put her foot on the windowsill and saw Claudette… grabbing her arm and looking scared, so, so scared.

Everything clicked in a rush of understanding, and Meg remembered herself, that she was out of that hellhole for good and that the Hag wasn’t going to get her-

“God.” The red-haired woman said, looking to the window and seeing that she was legit about to jump out of a second story window and seriously hurt herself. “Oh my God, Claudette-” She looked back and saw a small wave of relief pass over Claudette’s face, but the Canadian woman still had a look of serious worry etched onto her face.

“Meg, you-” Claudette’s voice broke for a moment, and Meg was astounded when Claudette continued to speak without crying because there was surely tears leaking down her own cheeks. “-I- I don’t know if we can still fall from great height and not break our ankles, but I didn’t want you to fall and find out that we can’t anymore.”

“Oh-” She breathed out in a rush, and in absence of not knowing what else to do, hugged Claudette tightly to her chest and pressed her face into the top of her head. “I’m so sorry, I had a nightmare-”

“I know.” Claudette muttered into her boobs, which felt nice, but wasn’t what Meg was really concentrating on at the moment. “I’m surprised you didn’t wake anybody else up. You were starting to whimper really loud.”

Shaking her head, the athletic woman kept apologizing. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so damn sorry, I would have never done that on purpose, I just thought...” The memories of the dream came back in an instant, the pain came back to almost a real degree and made Meg flinch in phantom agony.

“I was a Killer?” Claudette finished for her, and Meg wonders when Claudette got so bold and brave to say that out loud.

But not having to say it made Meg’s chest loosen, and she nodded in response as gratefulness. “And other things.” She finished, because she didn’t want to lie to Claudette and think that she’s  _ just  _ dreaming about the Killers-

“...Your mother?” And Meg found herself swallowing hard when she nodded. She had been expecting it  _ (they all had, really) _ when they had found out that Meg’s mother had passed away from her cancer only a couple of months after she had disappeared, practically killed by the grief of her daughter gone. Jake’s mother _ (blessed woman could pry biblical secrets out of Jesus)  _ had gotten in contact with her mother’s doctor and found all that out like that despite patient confidentiality agreements, privacy laws and all that without letting the doctor know that Meg was alive.

Guilt was still fresh despite having been at Jake’s fucking  _ castle  _ for nearly two weeks at this point, and deep down inside Meg knew that she would always think that she had killed her mother by being taken, that her mother gave up on life because after Meg had left, her mother had no one left to live for.

“Yeah, just- can we not talk about, right now?” And bless this small and tiny Canadian woman that simply nodded in agreement and held her hand and led her back to bed to cuddle back to sleep, because it gave her a good reason why Meg didn’t test her body’s limit on how far she could jump without breaking her ankles.

She was just about to close her eyes to attempt to rest when she felt Claudette pick her head up off her chest and look at the… wall, where Jake and Dwight were sleeping. “What?”

The smaller woman opened her mouth once before closing it with a  _ click! _ , and then opened it again. “I can see them. Or you. Sometimes.”

“Huh?”

“Like… how my perk used to work. Empathy.”

“What, like, you can still read auras?” That was both frightening and cool at the same time.

“Like when Dwight gave himself a papercut the other day trying to do that puzzle with Jake-”  _ Meg still had absolutely no idea how Dwight could give himself a papercut with a puzzle piece _ “-I saw his aura from in here.”

“That’s why you had bandaids already.” Well, that was nifty. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Jake’s family had a hard enough time hearing us talk about what happened, as well as mine, and I- I didn’t want to tack on supernatural abilities to that.”

Meg sat up to face Claudette, keeping her voice at a near whisper level. “No, I mean  _ us,  _ Claudette.” 

The other woman looked down in thought. “...I don’t want you guys to think that I was weird, if it was just me. Like, the Entity is still attached to me or something.”

“Dwight.” Meg looked at the wall dividing the girls’ room from the boys. “I wonder if he still has Bond.”

Claudette shrugged. “We can ask him tomorrow.”

But the conversation had woken Meg up fully, and she hopped out of bed, slipped her shoes on and pulled Claudette out of bed with her. “We can ask him now.”

“Now?” Claudette questioned, stumbling to get her shoes on too before Meg pulled her down the hallway barefooted. “They’re probably asleep!”

_ Like that would stop her.  _ “Well, they can wake the fuck up.” Pushing their door open with the hand not intertwined with Claudette’s, Meg drug the botanist down the short expanse of hallway between rooms and pushed the door open, throwing herself and Claudette on the open expanse of bed between Dwight and Jake.

“Hello, fellow gays!” Meg proclaimed, rolling over to hug Dwight from behind in a very possessive grip. “How are we doing at this fine time of-” She paused to look at the clock on the nightstand. “5:17 in the morning?”   
  


“For the love of God, Meg, why are you like this?” Jake groaned, rolling over from where he had been at the opposite end of the bed, face down and partly hanging off the edge. He had a phone in his hand, something that Meg was still surprised that Jake accepted as a present from his mother, and turned off the bright screen and let it clatter to his own nightstand.

“You weren’t asleep, anyways.” He couldn’t have been; he sounded too awake and didn’t look like an angry cat. “Dwight.” She shook the man she had her arms around roughly, and Dwight turned his head back, staring at her blankly. 

Meg had always thought Dwight really looked like a baby with his glasses. “Meg?” He asked, reminding her of just how blind he was without his glasses. “What’s- whastit, what wrong-”

“Do you still have Bond? Like, aura-reading and shit like that?” Dwight stared at her, mouth opened and eyebrows squishing together.

“N-No, I mean-” Dwight was a horrible liar, and Meg squeezed her arms painfully around Dwight’s stomach. “-okay! Like, it’s happened once or twice.”

“Really?” Jake sat up on his hands, suddenly interested in the conversation.

Dwight swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat and nodded. “Like… a night or so after we got here, I had a really bad night terror and I didn’t have my glasses on and I couldn’t see or find them, and- and, this may sound cheesy, but I really wanted one of you. I didn’t mean to do it on purpose, but that’s- that’s how I found Claudette downstairs.”

Jake sat up fully, running his hands through his bed-ruffled hair. “Wait- Dwight you think you still have Bond?” When Dwight nodded, Claudette answered “I think I still have Empathy.”

“Does that mean I have Sprint Burst?” Meg darted her eyes between her friends, suddenly feeling the need for a run- something she hadn't felt up to do yet. “Or Adrenaline? Or-”

“I had this old box of mine. A lock box.” Jake interrupted. “I had some really old family pictures and stuff from my grandfather in it. I broke the lock on it when I went to open it a few days ago- I thought it broke because it was kinda old, but now when I think about it, I was getting frustrated because I didn’t remember the combination and then the lock fell apart in my hands.”

“So, do we- do we all have  _ all  _ of our original perks, still?” Dwight asked, managing to locate his glasses and put them on after blindly fumbling for them during the entirety of Jake’s conversation. “That’s crazy, if we do. That… that kinda implies that, ummm, the Entity kinda… permanently changed us, doesn’t it?” Dwight put his hand to his mouth to bite his nails, but harsh and judgemental looks from all of his friends said  _ don’t do it. _

“I guess.” Meg shrugged, mind running off with all sorts of questions and possibilities, like what if she was literally the fastest person alive? What if Jake could literally break anything and they could start a bank robbing ring? What if the Entity was still within them and they could never truly escape its clutches-

Meg sat up and lept out of bed. “Hey, y’all ever considered that we can still fall from the top of buildings and not break our ankles?”

Despite being the athlete, Claudette was on top of her in an instant with a motherly grasp on her arm. “ _ Absolutely not!” _

  
Turns out they  _ could _ , albeit after Dwight jumped off the second story balcony he needed ice packs on his knees for the rest of the morning.  _ Baby,  _ Meg concluded.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> part 2 owo

_ Time passed. _

They moved out of Jake’s family’s place a few months later, taking up his mother’s demand that they move into one of their vacation houses down on the beach. Since they were still all technically missing and/or dead, they all sat down and had very lengthy discussions about maybe coming  _ “back”  _ from the dead and reclaiming their old lives and paperwork, or maybe taking Jake’s mother up on another of her offers to create false papers for them so they could start new. 

They eventually decided upon starting new, as having to explain where they were for so long would surely end them up in a loony bin somewhere. Or being experimented on by the government, as Jake kept reminding them. Jake also kept reminding them that they couldn’t live off his family’s money forever- which was a lie, they totally could as long as they didn’t do anything crazy.

_ Time passed. _

It took a lot of math, but Dwight was technically the oldest. Born in 1980 and taken in 2005, he was 25 when he first arrived in the Entity’s Realm. Being 2021 now, they decided to simply pick up where he left off, aging-wise, and was declared the oldest in a grand ceremony involving store-bought cupcakes and party crackers. Jake was the next oldest at a close 24, Claudette was 21 and Meg was 20.

“Hey, guys?” Jake asked, looking at everyone seated around their large kitchen table. When all eyes were upon him, he put down the little toy he got out of his cracker and asked:

“What do you think happened to everyone else?” Nobody immediately spoke, and Jake instantly regretted asking that question, but a burning desire within him wouldn’t let him keep the question to himself any longer.

Dwight finished chewing his cupcake. “Hopefully… they made it out like we did.”

“I’ve been thinking…” Meg sipped her Capri-Sun. “Like, take Grandpa Bill, for example. If he escapes back home, then he’s going right back to fighting zombies. Quentin will be right back to beating Freddy’s ass, Steve and Nancy are gonna be fighting big Demodogs-”

Dwight bit back a chuckle for some odd reason. “Sounds like we got lucky.”

Meg literally sucked her second Capri-Sun dry in one go. “Hear, hear!”

_ Time passed.  _

Meg, although originally wanted to keep her mother’s house, decided to sell it as her hometown in Mississippi was small and if she kept it, people would talk when they saw renovations taking place inside. The house had been left derelict for many years after her mother died, but amazingly most of the stuff inside was salvageable. Taking what she wanted, Meg sold the house to a private buyer far, far away from Mississippi and got a decent amount of cash for it.

After drinking a few questionable beers as a celebration for selling the house, Jake and Meg somehow ended up on the swings of a local park at 7 a.m., swinging back and forth and making tracks in the woodchips with their shoes.

“Who do you miss?” Meg asked Jake out of the blue, who had been sipping water to fend off a hangover as the alcohol slowly left his system. “Like the most? Out of everybody who was at the Campfire?”

Jake looked down at the ground, at the tracks his feet had made. “...for any reason?”

Meg gave him a sideways glance. “...is there something in particular?”

“...” Jake made a face akin to a grimace, and put his hands up in a shrugging motion. “David. We, uhhh…”

“Fucked?” Meg completed the statement for him, which got her a look of surprise. “Dude,  _ everyone  _ knew that you and David fucked. And no, David didn’t tell anyone, but it was really obvious.”

His eyebrows absconded into his hair, which really needed to be trimmed or cut or  _ something.  _ “How?!” 

Meg looked back at him like he was stupid. “Y’all would fight, get into each other’s faces, then say that y’all were gonna either or fight in the woods or y’all would storm off in different directions, and come back smelling like pine and blowjobs. Even Claudette caught on that you two were fucking each other raw out there.”

Jake didn’t know what to say. For years,  _ years-  _ he thought, and David did too, that they were really being low-key about it and that nobody else caught on when really everybody knew about it! Feeling all the air leave his lungs, Jake slumped against the chains of his swing and kicked his feet idly. 

“This is gonna sound petty or vain, I guess, but I miss the way, like…” Jake waved his arms in the air, looking for words he couldn’t catch.

Luckily, Meg caught some for him. “They way he used to breed you like a little bitch?”

Jake’s eyes went as wide as saucers, pausing in his swinging before he unscrewed the cap of his water bottle and tossed some water at Meg who squealed with laughter. 

“You would come back walking stiff and with a hoarse voice Jake, it’s really fucking obvious.”

“I guess, yeah, now that I think about it.” 

“But is that what you were saying? You miss the sex with David?” Meg watched as Jake went through several different emotions before he settled on nostalgia.

“I don’t miss him personally. Not really. But  _ oh my God,  _ that man could  _ fuck. _ ”

“We all thought he had a big dick. Did he have a big dick?”

“Ehhh…” Jake shrugged his shoulders after an internal debate. “Probably not as big as you guys  _ thought  _ it was, but yeah, it was big.”

Enraptured by the conversation, Meg kept pressing. “What was so good about it? Like, was it just his dick-?”

“Yes, but also he fucked hard. Like, really hard. Blow cum out of your nose hard.”

“Damn.” Meg whistled. “I need to get back into shape then if I want to compete.”

Taking another sip of his water, Jake snorted “Good luck. It’s going to take a lot of p-” Then he stopped as his brain caught up with what Meg had said to him. “What. What did you just say?”

If they hadn’t in a public place  _ (really, if Meg didn’t have self control and a little bit of a headache from the bright sun) _ , she probably would’ve walked over to Jake and picked him up, turned him around and bent him over the swing and got arrested for public indecency, but since they were trying to keep a low profile, she just smiled and waggled her eyebrows.

The look on his face made her laugh so hard she fell off the swing and got woodchips all over her.

_ Time passed. _

Claudette wanted to go to school to get a degree in being a botanist but was rather unsure when it came to thinking about future jobs. Jake was oddly enough the one to push her to go to college, and Dwight joking suggested that they could go together; Claudette gets a degree while Jake can finish his under shady circumstances. Jake, being high off home-grown weed, agreed to it with a airy laugh that he later tried to back out of when he was sober but  _ nope _ , Meg had recorded the whole thing.

Turns out, Jake was a terrible procrastinator when it came to schoolwork and Meg was an equally terrible enabler of procrastination.

_ Time passed.  _

_ “Happy 40th birthday, Dwight!” _ The card read, and Dwight couldn’t believe that he had made it to forty years old. The road of recovery from all sorts of trauma, PTSD and etc. was long and hard and was going to be for the rest of his life, but he was so glad that he had all of his friends  _ (and family even- at least his brother Frank came around every now and then to say hello!)  _ to help him through it.

_ But…  _ something was tugging at the back of his mind, especially now when he thought about his brother. Not in a bad way- Frank was a bit distant and not much of a family-get-together man, but Frank had always been good to him. Sometimes, better than their father was-  _ aha! _ , that was it! Frank was a good 7 years older than him, and was getting gray hair all around the edges of his hair. Their father,  _ God rest his soul _ , got gray hair by the time he was in his mid thirties’. And Dwight looked a lot like his father, down to the mole hidden under his eyebrow.

He didn’t have a single wrinkle on him, not a gray hair or age spot. While the rest of his friends were cleaning up from the small birthday party, Dwight stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked for any gray hair or  _ something  _ that would show that he was forty- but nothing. He still looked 25. Evidently, he had been in the bathroom for too long, because Jake knocked on the door and asked to come in.

“Uh, I’ll be out in a second!” But Jake came in anyways, wrapping an arm around his waist and resting his head on his shoulder. “Getting old sucks, huh?” He asked with a smile on his face, and Dwight pressed a kiss to the top of his hair that was pulled back in a bun because it’s  _ not like they could all go out and get dates- _ besides, they all had each other, and had all been through hell with each other, so why couldn’t they  _ all be together _ ?

“You’ll be 40 next year, Sasquasch.” Jake’s beard tickled through his thin T-shirt, a good sign that Jake needed to shave.

_ Time passed. _

There was something wrong. They all knew something was wrong, but not one of them had said anything yet.

It was nothing major, like a car breaking down or the house needed repairs because Meg got too kinky, but it was something that was slowly creeping up on them. 

They should all be happy: it was Dwight’s 48th birthday and they should all be having fun shooting each other with nerf gun bullets down on the beach, but after only about an hour of Dwight repeatedly getting shot in his glasses, they all headed in for the day from the lack of fun that was clearly written all over their faces.

Prime time TV sucked these days, and Dwight found the courage within himself to speak up first. 

“I know.” He said, and all three of his friends looked at him with knowing eyes. “I… I’m not stupid guys, even though my grades beg to differ.”

Claudette leaned up from where she was sitting peacefully in Dwight’s lap on the sofa and pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “You’re not stupid, Dwight.”

“Okay, look-” Meg muted the TV. “Let’s just all talk about this, okay? I’ll go first- I’m 43, and I still look 20. I should start getting, like, pre-menopause symptoms- Claudette certainly should, but I’m not. I look twenty-  _ I feel 20! _ ” Meg threw her arms up in the air with an exasperated noise.

“I don’t feel any older, either.” Claudette nervously cracked her knuckles and then looked at Jake in his chair. “Jake?”

“I haven’t aged a bit.” He agreed, putting down the book he was reading and crossed his legs. “My brother brought it up as a joke a little while ago and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.”

“Yeah, Ed’s starting to get gray hair around the edges, isn’t he?” Dwight asked, wrapping his arms around Claudette for comfort and so he doesn’t bite his nails  _ (he had finally kicked the habit a long time ago, but still had bad urges to fight) _ .

“Yep.” Jake popped the  _ p  _ a little too aggressively.

“Well, okay, let’s not jump the gun here.” Meg stood up, held her arms up high and got everyone’s attention. “Let’s just agree-  _ all of us-  _ that, since I’m the youngest one here- let’s go by how I age.”

“Okay?” Claudette tilted her head in confusion.

“What I mean is: if  _ I _ get to 50 and none of us have aged, then we can all have a fucking meltdown, okay? ‘Cause then we got a serious fucking problem.” They all agreed to Meg’s solution, and for several years they all managed to not let it worry them so much and enjoyed each passing birthday with more cupcakes and mini vacations- but they were never going to Six Flags again..

_ Time passed. _

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT- OKAY, HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!” It was Meg’s long-awaited 50th birthday, and when Meg came bursting into their kitchen, still looking 20, the shit hit the fan. Meg stomped up to the kitchen table where Dwight and Claudette were having eggs, bacon and toast for breakfast and Jake was reading the news off a tablet.

“I agree.” Claudette said in a rush, pushing the last few pieces of bacon around on her plate. “There’s something wrong.”   
  


“Oh my God, are we Highlanders? Are we, like, immortal?” Meg asked as a joke, but it suddenly became evident that it was a good answer to their argument. 

“We might be.” Jake replied in a light voice, sounding actually surprised that he didn’t think of it earlier. At looks from Dwight and Claudette, Jake shrugged and defended himself. “I mean- what else could it be? It’s 2051, right? We started counting our age based off what age we were when we got taken.”

“God, Jake, thanks for reminding me I’m actually 71.” Dwight tried to say it as a joke, but it just sounded really stressed and he regretted it instantly.  _ God, Frank’s 78!  _

“Listen, let’s just… think about this, okay?” Jake moved to the edge of his seat, putting his hands up to try and quell the rising anxiety.

“We can think about it all we want, Jake, it doesn’t change what’s actually happening!” Meg exclaimed, raising her voice at the calm man who was beginning to look frazzled. To stop the incoming argument, Claudette got up from her chair and got between the two.

“You two are not going to fight over this!” When Claudette raised her voice,  _ you listened.  _ “We do need to talk about this, Meg, but we also need to  _ do  _ things.”

“Like what?’ Dwight asked.

“First…” Claudette looked out the large living room windows of their beach house they’d lived in for thirty years. “I think we need to move. I know a lot of our neighbors aren’t here year-round, but our co-workers and the locals are starting to talk about our age.” She was mostly talking about the small flower shop she was running in the city, and how the few employees she had were always asking what she did to keep youthful. Meg worked at a local gym, and people were asking her the same things, too. It was becoming harder and harder to just blow it off and lie her way past it.

When Claudette’s mother passed away last year, they had all gone to Canada to see the woman in hospice after a heart attack, who was still very shocked to see that they were all so young-looking. Even when her father called to check up on her, he would always ask if they had finally gotten a few gray hairs.

It was getting to be too much. Dwight joked that if they stayed around for much longer, the townspeople would come to their house with pitchforks and burn them all as witches.

_ Time passed. _

They moved the next year to another beach house Jake’s family owned further south because people were asking serious questions about their ages and they couldn’t hide it their oddness anymore. Turns out, Jake’s family had a lot of beach houses that they could use.

It was so _odd_ when Dwight attended Frank’s funeral. Frank had been 80 and Dwight _technically_ was 73, and he looked younger than all of Frank’s four children. In fact, Dwight looked as young as Frank’s _grandchildren_ , and that’s when it really hit him: that he was apparently going to be young forever and all of his family was going to be aging like normal.

Asper, his youngest nephew, was the only one who approached him at the funeral to talk about his age. Or really approached him in general. “Uncle Dwight?” He asked, and Dwight noticed that what used to be little Aspie now had wrinkles all around his eyes and mouth.

“Yeah?” He asked, a sinking feeling dragging him to the floor.

“Dad told me before he died about… what you told him.” Asper lowered his voice. “About being in the place you told him about. My brothers and sisters don’t really believe what you told him and what he told us. They think you’re some government experiment or somethin’ like that, or that Daddy was crazy and lying. That’s kinda why they don’t let you around their own kids that much.”

“Well…” Dwight started, not sure of what to say. “They can think what they want to think.”

“Uncle Dwight, you’re 73 damn years old, and you don’t look a day past 30. You went missing for years and turned up without nothing, not a scratch on you. And your three friends, they aren’t old, either. You could be some government experiment, but I would think if you’re an experiment, you wouldn’t be allowed out in public.”

“That’s some sound logic, Asper.” Dwight said because  _ what else can he say.  _ Luckily for him, all the other people at the church were so preoccupied with gossiping that they could talk openly without having staring eyes prying into their conversation.

“Well… what I’m trying to ask is- well, you know I got my two kids, and they’re both just gettin’ old enough to ask  _ “Why does great-uncle Dwight look so young? If he was Grandpa’s brother why is he not old and wrinkly like him?” _ and I, well, I wanna ask your permission to tell them the truth. When they’re older, of course. Or, you could even tell them yourself.”

“Oh-” Wow, that was…  _ kinda an honor. _ It’s been years,  _ decades _ , since he’s had to tell somebody the story of his taking by the Entity from start to finish with fresh ears. On one hand, Dwight doesn’t want to scar his grand niece and nephew with his stories of horror and death, but then again, if he doesn’t tell them, then what will happen to his story? 

Dwight’s gotten a bit wiser as he’s gotten older, and he realizes now that this is the  _ only way _ for his family to keep knowing what happened to Dwight Fairfield, and for him to not fade away into obscurity if his biological clock decides to starts ticking one day.

Meg doesn’t have any family to tell her story to, Claudette has  _ (had)  _ a few cousins that are either dead or back in Canada and their children hardly know her. Jake has his mother and brother, and his brother has a son named Zorobel and Zoro has children, but… that’s it. There’s no one else to tell this to.

Dryly swallowing, Dwight agrees to Asper’s request even as painful memories resurface after all these years.

_ Time passed.  _

“Hey mom.” Jake is sitting right by his mother at her bedside with his brother on the opposite side, and their mother so small and tiny and all wrinkles. 

Dwight, Meg and Claudette are all sitting at the edge of her bed, paying their respects to the woman who helped put their lives back together after they escaped, the woman who has given them  _ everything _ ,  _ literally everything _

She’s 103 years old and in the final stages of congestive heart failure but still has the strength to smile and wave to all who came to see her. Meg wonders if her mother had the strength to do the same near the end of her life.

“My sons.” She says, holding one arm out to each of her two sons to take. Her voice is air thin and her throat sounds wet, but if Sook has something to say, then she’s going to say it.

She turns to Jake to address him. “You look like my great-grandson, not my son.”

Jake smiled, and Claudette could tell it was a bit forced. “I’ve heard that before, Mom.”

“Enough, I guess.” She says, before coughing loudly. She turns to Edward, whose 82 and still sporting a sharp, snarky look even in his old age. “You still have to take care of your baby brother, Edward, as long as you live.”

“He’ll probably put me in a home, soon enough.” Edward folds his arms over his chest, and his son Zoro pokes him in the cheek. “You know Uncle Jake will visit you once, then get banned.”

“Listen-” Jake starts, the smile on his face becoming more genuine. “-I don’t know who set all the wheelchairs to reverse.”

“Please, don’t get arrested.” Jake’s mother asks with a bright smile, her jaws trembling with the force of her grin and she moves to take Jake’s hand in both of hers. “But, Jake, I have a confession to make.”

“Yeah?”

“For years, your story… I had trouble believing it. I hated myself for it, that I couldn’t believe my own son, but… I couldn’t.”

Jake nodded. “I don’t blame you. Sometimes… I hardly believe it myself.”

“But as the years went on, and you didn’t get older, I started to think. I started to think that you were actually telling the truth. And that was so scary to think that you were telling the truth, because that means that you  _ suffered.  _ But… I look now, and you are still my baby boy that I lost to the wilderness many years ago but I am so, so old.” Tears leaked down her face, and she looked at Dwight, Claudette and Meg in the background. “I am so old, and you all are so young! And that means that you all suffered so much to be young forever. And I can’t help but wonder: is it a blessing or a curse? Would you have suffered knowingly to live forever? Because Jake-” It’s hard for Sook to breathe, but she inhales deeply as she turns to face her youngest son. “-I would have suffered for you, no matter if I knew or not. That’s what mothers do.”

She died a few days later, and it left them all thinking about their mortality- about how long they could all live. 

_ Time passed. _

Dwight was born in 1980. He had to do the math now to figure out how old he actually was versus how old he  _ considered  _ himself to be. The current year is 2072. The National Hurricane Center just announced that tropical systems will not be named in alphabetical order anymore and that’s interesting because they live in the small town of Sneads Ferry and last year a massive hurricane pushed the waves on their water-front-ish homes all the way up to the top steps of their porch and damaged their foundation. They just got the repairs done in time for Valentine’s Day, which was a big deal to Claudette because she said she had an announcement to make.

Claudette comes in the front door with a small bouquet of early blooming roses, and gives everybody two as long as they pay their toll with a smooch on the lips.

“Woohoo~” Meg teases, kissing Claudette far longer than needed be. “Does this mean kinky sex tonight? It’s my turn to peg Dwight.”

“Maybe, but I want to ask something first.” Ignoring Dwight’s protests, Claudette makes sure that she has everyone’s attention, then takes a deep breath and puts her purse down on the table.

“I’ve been thinking.” She begins. “Have we ever attempted to… have a baby?”

“WHOA, WHOA!” Meg jumps up from the table, rose petals going everywhere. “I told you, and everyone, a million times: I am not giving birth. You know what kind of horror stories there are on the Internet? How much stuff I read on Reddit?”

Claudette waits until Meg has to pause to take a breath before continuing to speak; a wise course of action. “I was asking because I want to know if it’s possible. I’m being serious.”

“Well…” Dwight beings, rubbing a hand over his 5 o’clock stubble. “There've been a couple of accidents, I guess. Especially in the beginning. But I think you and Meg have always been on birth control or we’ve used protection.”

“Exactly.” Claudette pointed out. “We haven’t ever tired, nor do I think we have ever been tested.”

“Are you saying-” Jake came up behind Claudette, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing a kiss to her shoulder. “-that you want to try and have a baby?”

Meg paled. “You’re not already pregnant, are you?”

Claudette chuckled. “No, I’m not. But...I was thinking about maybe trying? Or maybe we could have a surrogate, or IVF, or an Incubator Baby.”

“We could try.” Jake shrugged, a soft smile on his face. “But-” He raised a finger. “We have to think about us. Like, clearly, we’re gonna be around for a long, long time.”

“We’re Highlanders.” Meg corrected, booping Jake’s nose aggressively.

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay. But if we had a baby, would it be like us? Would it have our powers?”

Dwight joins the hug pile, wrapping his arms around Jake’s back while Claudette’s face is pressed into his chest. “And we have to consider what the child might want. If it does end up being immortal; does it want to be? What if it doesn’t want to be immortal and it ends up hating us?”

Meg wraps her arms around all of them with  _ force.  _ “What if they have kids?  _ Grandchildren _ : think about it. We could start a race of Highlanders. Course, there’s gonna have to be some level of inbreeding, but they could pull it off.”

Claudette snakes her arms around Megan’s waist and kisses her chin. “We’re not encouraging our potential descendants to be kissing cousins. But…” Claudette presses her face into Dwight’s chest. “...this is something I really want us to think about.”

“You really want kids, Claudy?” Jake asks, voice soft and teetering on the edge of excitement. For a long time, he was fine with not having kids, but now having seen his brother have a son, Zoro having children, and they have children of their own… 

Jake finds having a child to be something to look forward to. He’s 82 and he thinks that to be a ripe old age to settle down.

“How would that happen?” Dwight asks. “Like, all four of us.”

“Science has come a long way.” Claudette says with a knowing look in her eye. “If two women and two men can have biological children, then four people should be able to have a child that is a part of all of them.”

“You know what?” Meg says. “I’m down with that. If we can all have a child together, I’m down for at least trying.”

“I second that.” Jake presses a long kiss on the top of Claudette’s head, and then spares one for Meg’s lips.

“Third.” Claudette murmurs, even though she was the mastermind of the whole discussion. Then all eyes are on Dwight, and Dwight feels resoundingly defeated even though he was going to agree in the first place.

“Then it’s settled, then. But no hasty decisions.” Dwight tongues Jake grossly over Claudette’s head, and despite Claudette making a disgusted noise, Meg cheers them on. 

“I knew the roses meant kinky sex!”

_ Time passed. _

Not much time had passed since discussing possible children, but it reminded Dwight of the promise he had made to Asper about telling his children… what he’s been through. 19 years ago to this day, his brother Frank died, and a few days after that he promised Asper that fateful promise.

It was nineteen years later. Ivan was getting ready to go off to college to be an engineer and Tasha had just graduated high school  _ (it wasn’t called high school anymore, but that’s what Dwight still calls it) _ and he’s had nineteen years to think about what he’s going to say to them, but when he makes the trip all the way to Wever, Iowa and arrives at Asper’s front door, the door of the house he grew up in nearly a hundred years ago, Dwight finds that he doesn’t know what to say.

Dwight is technically 92 years old, yet he still doesn’t look a day over 25. Apser opens the door, and the ex-Survivor can’t help but become sadden by how Asper is becoming older.

“Uncle Dwight!” But his nephew hugs him, voice cherry and eyes bright, helping Dwight to feel a little bit better about the whole situation. “I kinda can’t believe you’re here.” Asper doesn’t say it out loud, but Dwight knows full well what he’s implying. “Come on in.”

Dwight steps inside. The doorway from the living room to the kitchen had been widened, and the walls have been painted a light cream color, but other than that the house is relatively the same. Almost hauntingly so. Asper offers him coffee, but Dwight turns it down as well as the beer offered to him. He only accepts a glass of water because his throat is dry with anxiety.

“The kids are upstairs, doing… whatever kids do these days.” Asper smiles at him from the chair he’s sitting in. Dwight sees his own father in Asper, but also a bit of Frank and even himself. Asper has his eyebrows and forehead, that’s for sure.

Dwight sips his water before putting it down on the clear table made of strong glass that actually feels like real wood. It displays a little cup holder for him to put his glass on.  _ Science, these days. _ “Whatever it is, it probably isn’t considered  _ safe _ .”

Asper laughs. “Well, I would say  _ how would you know _ since you don’t have children, but you’re far older than me, so who am I to question your knowledge?”

Asper then stands up and walks to the edge of the stairs leading to the house’s second story. “Kids! Uncle Dwight wants to speak to you!” The sound of four feet clomping down the stairs is jarring to Dwight’s chest, and for a moment he wonders if he’s about to have a heart attack because his chest is vibrating with the force of his heart beating against his rib cage. It reminds him of the heartbeat he use to hear,  _ if he was lucky _ , against the Killer who got too close to him, as a warning that he should find a place to hide lest he become their next victim-

“Hi, Uncle Dwight.” Both Ivan and Tasha come down the stairs and give him a hug that he returns with sweaty palms. Ivan looks  _ so much  _ like him, it’s almost uncanny- Ivan even had  _ lots  _ of bullies in school just like him. Tasha, though, looks quite a bit like his mother did- same lips, same cheekbones, she has her stature, but Tasha looks a lot like her own mother, too. Dwight didn’t get to meet her that much, as she and Asper divorced due to some  _ infidelity  _ on her part, and Asper hasn’t remarried.

“Kids- Ivan, put away your phone. Uncle Dwight has something very important to tell you.” Ivan puts him phone away with a shake of his head, and suddenly his grand niece and nephew are looking at him with expectant eyes and he’s taken back to one of the first Trials he was in, with Claudette and Meg both looking at him expectantly when Jake had fallen victim to the Trapper-

_ “Dwight, what do we do?” Meg asked, bouncing on her heels as Jake’s scream of pain echoed throughout the forest. “You know the monster isn’t going to let him go now that he’s got him in the basement!” _

_ Claudette shakily nods in agreement, shivering in fear. “We can’t just leave him- not after what he’s done for us!” _

_ “Okay, okay, um-” Dwight was scared and panicking; everyone was counting on him! He had always wanted to prove himself to others around him, and now that he has the opportunity to do so, he’s on the verge of blowing it. _

_ He thinks: we can’t leave Jake behind, no matter what. A surge of confidence overcomes him, and despite having a shitty plan, he uses his best manager voice and tells the girls what to do.  _

_ They all lived and escaped that time. _

“Uhh, Uncle Dwight?” Tasha asked, bringing Dwight out of his reprieve. “Are you okay? You got that  _ “war is hell”  _ look on your face again.” He sucked in a deep breath, willing his racing to heart to return to it’s normal levels and drawing on that long since used  _ Leader  _ perk to gain back that confidence so that his voice doesn’t shake.

He gives Asper a quick look, and his nephew nods back. Dwight sighs. “You know how your father told you to tell everyone that I’m your uncle, and not your great uncle?” The children nod. “Well, you know why you do that, right?”

“Yeah.” Ivan responds. “You’re like, a hundred years old and you look my age.” Ivan is twenty-one. The same age Claudette was when she was taken-

“But do you know  _ why?”  _ Dwight emphasises the  _ why _ , and the two on the couch across from him look confused for a moment, but then Tasha’s eyes light up.

“Dad told us that you would tell us one day. Wait- is that why you’re here, to tell us?” She looked excited, and Dwight can’t help but think that she’s not going to be very excited for long once she hears the truth.

“Yes.” He saws, and the two looks at each other and bump shoulders, excited looks on their faces and they’re suddenly both asking him millions of questions.

“You two!” Asper says, and they both stop yelling over each other to look at their father. “We’ll tell you, but you have to  _ swear  _ never to tell anyone.”

Ivan rolled his eyes. “We know, Dad-”

“No, I’m serious, son.” Asper sat up in his seat and pointed a finger at both of his children. “You can never, ever tell anybody what Uncle Dwight is about to tell you. Only your own children that you may or may not have one day. No posting it online, not your girlfriends or boyfriends, not your husbands and wives, not your dog or friend-  _ nobody. Both of you.” _

“We know, Dad, we promise.” Asper shook his head.

“No, kids, you have to  _ swear  _ on everything that you have. If you tell anybody, God knows what’ll happen to you. There’s people out there that would  _ kill you  _ to find out why Dwight’s like this. Like the government.” Asper was both joking and serious, but the kids both took it as serious.

“Like, is the government really after you, Uncle Dwight?” Ivan asked. “Aunt Fanta said that he’s some sort of governmental experiment-”

“I swear I won’t tell anyone, Uncle Dwight. Trust me, I don’t want to end up in a cage, being experimented on.” Tasha interrupted, and after giving her brother a look, Ivan agreed to the same.

Silence befell the house then, except for the quiet whir of electricity running through the building.

Flashes of blood and dangling hooks passed under Dwight’s closed eyelids when he blinked to take a breath, but he pushed through it, like he had been for the past five decades.

He opened his mouth.  _ Might as well start from the beginning.  _ “I was born 15th of July, 1980.” Asper made a motion for him to keep going, but got up out of his seat and went upstairs quietly. 

“I was born in what’s now the old Delafort nursing home out in Burlington, you know where that is?” Both of the kids nodded: that’s where Frank went to in his last few months. “It used to be the Great 71st Street Hospital. Got decommission when one was built more uptown with more resources.”  _ So far so good. _

“I grew up in this house. Your grandfather sold off some of the outlying farmland to developers when he got older, but the farm used to be twice the size it is now. I hated farmlife.” Dwight chuckled. “I hated having to pick corn, hated having to feed cows, run from chickens, smelling like farm animals all the time, everything. I left pretty much right after high school- what you guys call Third Phase Schooling now.”

“Wow.” Ivan said. “What did you do, like, sell drugs? Sex work?”

“No!” Dwight exclaimed. “No- trust me, I know that was almost eighty years ago, but we weren’t barbarians back then. It was different back then, sure, but I first got a job as a pizza delivery man in Illinois, so I moved and stayed there. Then I got a second job as an office worker to help pay the bills because minimum wage was  _ much  _ lower back then, and living expenses weren’t cheap.”

“How’d you get a job?” Tasha asked. “There wasn't the Internet back then.”

“The old fashioned way: I walked around town, read the newspaper.  _ Talked to people.”  _ Dwight made the last part sound spooky. “It sucked. I got bullied a lot in school like you did, Ivan, but people still bullied me as an adult. Took advantage of me, a lot, too. Made me do work I wasn’t supposed to do like clean the floors or work overtime for little or no pay. I was the butt of a lot of jokes and I was always the scapegoat.”

“Why did you do it?” Ivan asked, just as Asper was coming back down the steps with a fire-proof metal box that was covered in dust. “You should’ve reported them.”

“Things were different back then.” Dwight shrugged, _ because that’s how it was _ . “Partly because I was scared that I would lose my job and be blacklisted, and also because I was afraid to speak up. But at that point, as long as I didn’t work on a farm, I was alright. But my life sucked.”

Asper took the box in the kitchen to clean it off. Ivan pulled his legs underneath him. “And you discovered that you’re immortal…?”

“He’s getting there!” Tasha smacked his arm. “Go on, Uncle Dwight.”

“Well…” Dwight wrung his hands and almost bit his nails. “I was twenty-five, and the manager of my office job said that we were gonna go out into the woods for some “team-building exercise” stuff, and I was  _ that  _ desperate to make myself not the office clown, so I agreed to go.”

“Sounds sketchy.” Tasha commented, and Dwight nodded with a hard swallow. “I kinda figured it was beforehand, but I was so desperate… I didn’t go with my gut. I should’ve, because all they did was get drunk and have sex.”

Ivan pulled a face. “Ew, gross. But it also sounds like something stupid people would do.” 

“And I’m stupid for not leaving when I had the chance.” Asper came back with a clean box and sat down in his chair, sparkling silver box in his lap. “I was essentially peer-pressured into drinking some of their homemade moonshine, and after the first drink I don’t really remember what happened, but I know that they threw my glasses down an embankment and made me go get them, and I passed out in a ditch down there.”

“Wait.” Ivan interrupted. “If you don’t remember, how do you know?”

“I’ll get to that later, but take my word when I say that’s what happened.”

Tasha pursed her lips together. “When did you wake up?”

“When I woke it, I realized something was… off. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew I wasn’t in the same place I was. The trees were different, and there was this campfire right in front of me. I tried to walk out of the woods, but I always came back to the same fire, over and over again until I was sure I had lost my mind.”

“Are you sure you didn’t?” Ivan asked.

“I’m sure.”  _ And here comes the hard part.  _ “I eventually stopped after a while-”

“Couldn’t you call on your phone for help?” 

“No, we didn’t have cell phones back then.” Both of the kids looked scared at that, and Dwight couldn’t help but chuckle. “I know, scary, right? But as I was saying, I stopped after a while and waited to see if anyone else would come, but then this… really heavy fog came in all of a sudden, and then I fell asleep again. When I woke up this time, I was again somewhere different.”

“I was in this really weird forest, but somewhat different that the one the campfire was in. There were odd brick walls that were in similar patterns, large generators scattered around, wooden pallets propped up onto walls, and then…” Dwight stopped.

_ The heavy breathing of the Trapper assaulted him from all angles. The barbed monster looked down upon him where he was bleeding severely from a trap at his ankle and chuckled- _

“There was the monster.” He finished in a rush before he could get himself back under control. “Or Killer, as we called him.”

“‘We’ as in Uncle Jake, Aunt Meg and Aunt Claudy?” Tasha questioned.

“At first, yes. The Killer, the first one that we ever faced-”

“Wait, a killer?” Ivan asked. “Like a serial killer?”

“...Kinda?” God, he had to explain everything for the first time in decades. “He was called the Trapper because he had large traps that would almost break your whole ankle off if you happened to step in one. And he would hunt us down, slash us with his blade, and then hang us up on meathooks by our shoulder.”

“Like that Texas Chainsaw movie?”

“Yeah, except that… the…  _ thing  _ that kept us trapped in this place, a  _ thing  _ we called the Entity, would start to form claw-like things around the hook to stab us with if we dangled there too long.”

“And then what?” Tasha was way too interested in this. Dwight blamed her love for video games. “If nobody came to save me, then the Entity would eat us. Well, our soul.  _ Well,  _ it really ate emotions, but… I’m still not sure how it all works, but it ate our feelings and then spat us back out at the campfire from before, perfectly fine and healthy. Like nothing ever happened.”

Asper put the box on the table while Dwight took a small break to collect himself. “These are Dwight’s records- mind if I show the kids?” Asper asked, and Dwight waved him on. “Here’s Uncle Dwight’s birth certificate.” The first piece of yellowed paper he placed on the table for the kids to see was the birth certificate, and Ivan picked it up with a delicate touch.

“Wow.” He muttered. “Dwight Eisenhower Fairfield- July 15th, 1980.” He smirked. “Holy shit, you’re  _ old.” _

“This paper is disgusting.” Tasha picked up the Driver’s License her father handed her, after explaining to her exactly what it was. They stopped issuing those, Dwight remembered, when Tasha was just an infant. “How did people  _ read  _ these?”

“It was much cleaner looking back then.” Dwight took it from her for a moment to read the peeling laminated yellowing card, and agreed that it was very hard to read. “A lot of pizza grease stained this card.” The issue date was 2001, something he noted out loud.

“What happened if you lost it?  _ How  _ did you not lose it?”

“You would go down to the DMV and get a new one. If a cop pulled you over and you didn’t have one, you would be arrested for driving without a license.” Asper answered his son’s question, and pulled Dwight’s high school diploma out for the children to look at.

“So, you and your friends were stuck in this place with a Cthulhu thing that wouldn’t let you leave because a serial killer had to put you on a hook so it could eat your feelings.” Tasha summarized pretty accurately. “Wow. Sounds fucked up.”

“Yeah. You have no idea. It wasn’t just once.” The kids looked surprised by this answer. “No, you did it constantly. Those generators I mentioned earlier were the only way to get out. You had to fix 5 of them to open a gate so you could leave. And time was… different there. Sometimes it went fast, sometimes it went slow. Sometimes, it even went in reverse.”

Ivan rolled Dwight’s diploma back up and placed it on the table. “How long were you there? Do you know?”

“I was taken by the Entity in 2005. I escaped in the year 2021.”

Looking down at his hands, Ivan counted under his breath. “Wait, that’s… 16 years. You went through all that for 16 years?”

“It felt like forever. Like… you’re- you’re just kids and I don’t want to scar you for life, but you have no idea the pain and torture that we all went through. More killers came over the years as well as more survivors, like me, and it never stopped. They got more brutal and violent over the years, inventing new ways of torturing and harming us, and… several of us didn’t make it through it.” 

“What happened to them?”

“They were basically thrown away by the Entity into a void. When the Entity took all your emotions that it could, you became useless. An empty shell.”

“How many others were there?” Tasha asked.

“At the time that we escaped, there were 26 survivors, including me, and some 24-ish killers. It was getting really crowded there.” He remembers that Survivors were basically sleeping on top of one another at the campfire, if they got to sleep at all.

“Well, how did you escape? Did you run out of feelings?” Ivan was trying to see if Dwight’s old flip phone was transparent by holding it up to the light.

“No, umm, Claudette, Jake, Meg and I were just… there for so long we had gotten so good at the Entity’s sick games, I guess. One day, we all four were put in this, like, arena-looking place that I didn't realize ‘til later was sort of like a final test. We escaped unharmed from the Trapper and kept running out the exit gate until we got to this… other place. We had never seen it before, but it was filled with glowing zombies of old survivors and killers, we assumed, and Meg ran them all around while Jake and us broke the lock on this other huge gate, and then…”

Dwight had looked down at his hands for the last few trembling moments, remembering how much oil, dirt and blood he had been caked in, and how it was all gone, like it had never happened. “We woke up in these woods near Mariba, Kentucky. And that was it.”

“Just like that?” Tasha looked like she had been robbed of a final battle. “Just like that, all the torturing and everything- you just get set loose?”

“Well, we had to beat those zombies, but yeah, pretty much.” Ivan had given up trying to see through the flip phone, and instead looked at the car keys to Dwight old Honda Accord. People didn’t use car keys now, either.

“What about the others?” Ivan twirled the keys around. “Did they escape?”

“We don’t know. We’ve never saw any of them- trust me, we’ve looked and looked. We stopped after a while because it just… was too stressful.” He still felt bad about not looking for his old friends, but it was just too painful to keep reminding himself of what he went through while searching for his fellow survivors.

Ivan stopped tossing the keys in the air when Asper took them away from him, warning him about cutting himself on the rusting metal of the keychain. “When did you realize you were immortal?”

“When I was about 45 and I realized that I didn’t have any gray hair. My father got gray hair in his mid thirties. But we tried not to panic. We all agreed that if Aunt Meg got to 50 and none of us had aged, because she was the youngest, then we would panic.”

“She’s way older than fifty now.” Tasha was fascinated with Dwight’s old walkman. “What did you do?”

“We panicked.”

Everyone laughed, including Dwight. “We did!”

“Why are you immortal, though?”

“We… think it’s because in the Entity’s place, after every trial we would revert to what we looked like when we first got there. Same clothes, same age, no wounds or anything. We think that all that biologically changed us because we were there for so long. But we really don’t know. I could turn as old as your father tomorrow and I wouldn’t know.”

“You know…” Tasha started, then shook her head. “Never mind.”   
  


“What?” Dwight asked, genuinely curious about what she was going to say. “What was it, Tashy?” Her nickname always got her to talk.

“What you describe sounds a lot like a video game that came out this past summer. A really popular one, actually.”

“Video games all sound the same.” Asper said, but Tasha shook her head. “No, Dad, like… really similar. Like, creepily similar. It’s even got the same premise: 4 people run away from a monster who wants to hang them in the basement for this thing actually called  _ The Entity _ and it even says in the title _ “Death is not an escape.” _ because the premise of the game is that you can’t escape, even if you survive the monster.”

Suddenly, Dwight was very interested in video games. “What’s it called?”

“Dead By Daylight.” 

Alarm bells were going off in Dwight’s head.

“Who made it?”

“I think the idea was pitched to this development team by a lone game developer, like as a thing to get the game going during some gaming idea competition shit, and the developer got her idea approved and they put some funding behind it and Dead By Daylight was born.”

“Who was it?’ Dwight tried not to appear rabid, but he was sure he was  _ foaming  _ at the mouth. 

“Hey, Roxy!” Tasha called out, and the table beneath them lit up at the voice command. “Who is the creator of Dead By Daylight?”

A holographic screen popped up over the box and papers, showing the silhouette of a Killer that looked very similar to the Trapper with some familiar symbols scattered across it.

_ “Dead By Daylight was initially created by a lone developer, Feng Min, in 2070, and her idea was adopted by a gaming company called Behaviour INC and released to gaming stores worldwide. Dead By Daylight is a very popular game, having sold over 20 million copies worldwide in its first 9 months alone. According to Feng Min, this game was inspired by some personal life experiences as well as taking inspiration from other horror genres and her own imagination…” _

Dwight’s jaw hit the floor.

If anybody would do this, it would be Feng Min.

He didn’t care that everyone else was staring at him or that the kids were right there-  _ he couldn’t believe it!  _ “That crazy bitch. She actually did it.” Feng Min, classified herself as a gamer for life, always joked about escaping and making all their experiences a video game that would be wildly popular and she would be so rich that she could buy all of them as personal servants.

But then the shock wore off.

Feng Min was alive.

“Roxy.” Dwight wasn’t all too familiar with voice commands stuff, but he knew enough. “Where does Feng Min live?”

_ “You mean Feng Min, creator of Dead By Daylight?” _

“Yes.”

_ “Feng Min currently lives in Montreal, Canada, although she has lived in China, South California, Florida, Puerto Rico-” _

“Thank you.” Dwight cut off the voice command as he fished out his phone, ignoring all questions. He speeddialed Claudette, praying that she would pick up-

“ _ Hey, Dwight, ho-” _

“Feng Min’s alive.”

**Author's Note:**

> (shameless plug lmao)
> 
> I take writing commisions at jekwrites.tumblr.com im always in need of cash and things to do!


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